A Long Trip to Teatime

By Anthony Burgess and Fulvio Testa

"The original illustrations, marvelously expressive black and white drawings by Fulvio Testa, form the ideal complement for Burgess's text." — The Emerald City Book Review
Edmund Ironside, Edward the Confessor, Edward the Elder, Edward the Martyr . . .  Edgar wearies of an endless history lecture on England's Anglo-Saxon kings and longs for an escape from the classroom—which he finds with a sudden plunge through a tiny hole in his desk. Now Edgar is on the shores of Easter Island, listening to the chiming of Easter bells, and searching for Edenborough, from whence he must find his way home in time for tea. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, Edgar finds himself astray in a wonderland, his bizarre adventures highlighted by gloriously nonsensical conversations with curious creatures.
Anthony Burgess, the acclaimed author of A Clockwork Orange, plays with logic and language in this captivating lost classic. Studded with Joycean puns and fantastical words, the dreamlike odyssey offers a passing nod to the concepts of free will and relativity and can be appreciated by readers of all ages. This edition marks a return to print for A Long Trip to Teatime, which has been unavailable since the late 1970s. Newly republished in the centennial of Burgess's birth, this volume features the charming original illustrations by artist Fulvio Testa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Feb 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780486820729

Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess is the author of many works, including The Long Day Wanes, The Wanting Seed, The Doctor Is Sick, Nothing Like the Sun, Honey for the Bears, and Re Joyce.

Book preview

TEATIME

CHAPTER I

Straight Through a Hole in the Desk

EDGAR WAS heartily sick of the droning voice of Mr Anselm Eadmer, who was going on, through the gorgeous spring afternoon, about Edmund Ironside and Edward the Confessor and Edward the Elder and Edward the Martyr, and the rest of the boring kings of Anglo-Saxon England. Edgar’s desk was pocked with tiny holes made by doodling compass or dividers, and he thought what a capital thing it would be if he could become small enough to creep into one of those holes and vanish – his real diminished self, that was – until the lesson ended, while this big bored self became a wide-eyed responsive machine, taking it all in about Anglo-Saxon royalty. Imagine his surprise, then, to find himself suddenly on a ship being steered carefully through one of those holes – the one nearest the D of his own carved and inked-in first name – and to hear voices calling in a language he did not understand. He was standing on deck, well-wrapped against a piercing wind that cried in from the other end of the hole, and an old man was standing next to him, all white beard and oilskins, with a red-coaled pipe held firm in smiling jaws. The old man said:

‘You, boy – are you on the crew-list? What’s your name? Solomon Eagle? John Earle? Hareton Earnscliff? Atalanta, Perseus, Cupid, Psyche, Alcestis, Pygmalion, Bellerophon? Ah, that was a great ship, the Bully Ruffian we used to call her. Speak, boy, and answer.’ But he did not seem really interested, and Edgar did not wonder, for the ship had at last come through the hole, or rocky tunnel as it really was, and into a wide sea where the gulls were crying ‘Repent! Repent! The end of the world is coming!’

‘Eagles they should be by rights,’ the old man said, still smiling. And then, suddenly frowning, he called: ‘Laxdaela!’ or something like it to a couple of members of the crew, who replied with sounds like isk and bosk and etheldeth. ‘We put you ashore,’ said the old man to Edgar, ‘on Easter Island. There it is, on the port bow.’

Edgar had too many questions to ask. He asked one only. ‘What language are they speaking, sir?’ he asked.

‘There it is,’ said the old man, ‘coming up now. Listen to the Easter bells.’ And the sea air had suddenly become alive with a sweet loud jangling. ‘But don’t,’ he said, ‘expect the place to be full of eggs and hot cross buns, because it won’t. The people there have very long ears, right down to their shoulders, and their gods are the same. Look, you can see some of those stone idols, all along the shore. To keep out intruders, that was the idea. But it won’t keep you out, oh dear me, no.’

‘Why do I have to be put ashore?’ asked Edgar. ‘Why can’t I stay on the ship and go wherever you are going?’

‘Eastward ho,’ said the old man, who, it dawned on Edgar, must be the captain. ‘That’s where we’re going. To see Sir Petronel Flash. Also Moses and the Devil and the great Orc. No place for you, boy. Ah, the boat’s being lowered.’

He was standing on deck, well-wrapped against a piercing wind that cried in from the other end of the hole, and an old man was standing next to him, all white beard and oilskins, with a red-coaled pipe held firm in smiling jaws.

So it was. They were still some way from the shore, all along which stone effigies stood, and Edgar did not really enjoy climbing down the nets to the two rowers who awaited him, men who had stripped off their oilskins for the sudden heat and were now half-naked, though, in a sense very fully clothed in tattooings. On the chest of one of them was the blued-in face of a rather pretty girl, her presumed name Rhoda Fleming etched in beneath. ‘Hallo there,’ said the face, to Edgar’s mixed fear and amusement. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’

‘Don’t you listen to her,’ said the other man, whose chest and stomach were covered with a very fine map of Hindustan, all twinkling lights and bullock-carts moving along the roads. ‘It’s for me she’s saying that, not you. What you might call a longstanding feud, my name being Bob Eccles. So, then – off we go.’ And they both plied lustily with their oars. The man who had not yet spoken now spoke, though jerkily and rather breathlessly with the effort of rowing:

‘You watch out, son, for the mother of the Blatant Beast. If you see a lady there that’s like a big snake from the waist down, then you know it’s her.’

‘No, no,’ cried Edgar with sudden panic. ‘Take me back. Take me back to school and Mr Eadmer and the kings of Anglo-Saxon England.’

The two men laughed, and Rhoda Fleming laughed too, all blue teeth.

‘Why,’ said Bob Eccles, ‘bless your heart, son, she’s nought to be afeared on. Worn out she is now, having been mother to no end of monsters – Chimera and Orthrus and the Sphinx of Egypt itself. Also Cerebo and the Hydrant.’

‘Haven’t got them two last ones quite right,’ said the other man. ‘But never mind. Sing us a song, young un, to keep us in trim for the rowing.’ So Edgar sang a song he knew, when he started, he did not know, but knew that he would know when he started. It went like this:

But by now the two little blue-clad men were jumping up and down on the very edge of the pier and crying: ‘The pancakes are burnt and it’s all your fault.’

‘A forrard leak on the garboard strake

And the harbour bar o’erflowing,

For there’s many a man must whistle and ache

And stretch and stitch till his callions break,

And hark to the cock for the morning’s sake

And his cree cray crack craw crowing.’

To, but perhaps not really, his surprise, the two toiling mariners joined in with a shanty burden:

‘With a hey and a ho and the bo’sun’s dead

And his bed unmade in the morning.’

Edgar found himself, without effort, trolling a second verse:

‘The trisail’s brayed on the mizzen trees,

And sop up rum by the bottle,

And the galley’s alive with the reek of cheese,

And the noontide lobscowse fails to please,

And the cargo’s eaten alive by fleas,

And the donkey goes half-throttle.’

The two rowers growled their refrain:

‘With a hoo and a hee and the first mate’s oiled

And he’s boiled with eggs in the morning.’

To his, but he was no longer really capable of it, surprise, Edgar found that he was being rowed towards a nice clean wooden pier, and two little men in blue uniforms were dancing up and down on it, as if with rage at the approach of the boat.

‘What’s that they’re shouting?’ Edgar asked.

Both rowers made faces, as if to say: it’s always like this. The one who was not Bob Eccles said: ‘It’s their dinner-hour, you see, and they don’t like to be disturbed at it.’.

‘In it,’ the other said, ‘or perhaps during it might be more of an ecclesiastical polity.’

‘No, more of an ecclesiastical sonnet, I’d say,’ said the other, and the tattooed face of Rhoda Fleming began to recite I wandered lonely as a cloud. ‘Not having that I’m not,’ said her owner sadly, looking down and giving himself three extra chins. ‘It’s the mention of Wordsworth that does it,’ he explained to Edgar. ‘She met him once, you see when I was having a bath in Lake Windermere, if you know where that is. Silly old man, I thought, with his top hat on.’

‘Look,’ Edgar said, as the boat began to touch the steps of the pier, ‘why don’t they get on with having their dinner instead of jumping up and down like that in a rage?’

The other two shook their heads. ‘See now,’ said the one who was not Bob Eccles, ‘why don’t I